Tag: A1GP

Congratulations to Alex Yoong and A1 Team Malaysia for winning the second round of the 06/07 A1GP season at Brno today.

It was a strong day for Team Malaysia as Alex had driven consistently in the top 3 during qualifying and rounded that up with a stong start to finish victory in the sprint race. He followed this up with another victory in the feature race!

This is the second & third victory achieved by Alex Yoong and Team Malaysia in the new international racing series. Well done.

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Fellow my-KARTers and Tail Happy Racing teammates Yusnee, Azlan and I managed to get some invitations to the Perdana Suite for round 5 of the A1 GP at Sepang on 20 November 2005.

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Datuk Mokhzani Mahathir and SIC for extending the invitation to us. We thoroughly enjoyed the hospitality and more importantly the race.

And what an excellent race it was. Again, Team Malaysia demonstrated that they had the potential to be up there with the best by finishing 8th and 5th in the sprint and feature races, respectively. With this consistent finish, Malaysia is now joint 6th in the A1 GP championship after 5 rounds.

Both Fairuz and Alex drove strong races, and especially Alex despite experiencing another problematic pitstop which lost Team Malaysia about 10 secs and potentially 4th place. Alex managed to steal 5th from Team New Zealand on the very last lap drawing cheers from the 10,000 crowd.

Shame that the crowd was not as is should be given the size of the grand stands. It would have been great had their been more hype in the media weeks prior to the race. Sadly, the truth is that there was very little coverage in the local papers. The Star had only bothered to allocate a small panel to report the goings on of the weekend. In other countries there would have been pull out sections.

As it turned out, the Malaysian round of the World Cup of Racing was probably the best race of the season so far. There were battles through all the positions. And the fact that tyre wear was a factor made it even more exciting. Alex and Fairuz both had several sideways moments as they struggled for tyre grip.

The Malaysian weather also made a cameo appearance 4 laps from the end of the race to make things even more interesting.

Aside from enjoying the race, Yusnee did a lot of hard selling for my-KART promoting the round 10 final race to every personality in the Perdana Suite including TV personality Sarimah Ibrahim, Datuk Azman Yahaya, Aminuddin Omar, and Maznah Zolkifli.

All I can say is what a fantastic race and event it was. Let’s hope there will be more corporate sponsorship and support for our own team in the A1 GP. Malaysia is in sixth, and the best Asian. We only need more experience and funds.

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Malaysia will be Round 5 of the 12 round “winter” racing series – the Racing World Cup of Nations.

It is quite a unique concept which harks back to the the pre-war Grands Prix series (precursor to F1) where (usually European) nations would have an entry with their own manufacturers to battle each other in the premier racing series. Those days, the teams would run in national colours – although those colours have somewhat changed in the modern day A1GP series (eg – Italy was red in the early days and now blue – the azzuris; and Germany was silver, but now follows their national football team colours).

Still the concept is a cool concept and for A1GP to race in the “F1 winter” offers racing fans something to follow when F1 is taking its long break.

As for Team Malaysia, this is really our first time in the motorsports world stage and as such the challenge for Team Malaysia is really getting quickly up to speed with the racing culture, the commitments to deliver results, the teamworking, the technology, the psychology, the PR and everything else.

Against popular opinion, Team Malaysia has done ourselves proud by being fairly competitive. Yes, there are teething issues, yes there is a hint of lack of experience, but being joint 9th and 9 pts off from 4th place after 5 rounds is pretty good. And this is on merit mind you – as Malaysia has constantly qualified within the top 10, and both Alex & Fairuz has done great things to improve on those grid positions. Alex was even up to 2nd in the main race in Germany during the early stages!

So things are looking up for Team Malaysia and hopefully they (we) can build on this momentum and continue to improve and catch the leading bunch of France, Brasil and Switzerland.

So Friday will see Team Malaysia putting the A1GP car thru its paces and hopefully both Alex and Fairuz can use a bit of local track knowledge to push the Team further up the ranks. If weather becomes a factor, let’s hope that it brings Team Malaysia a positive change.

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The 4th round of the A1GP season at Eastern Creek in Australia just ended. The race was won by France, followed by Britain, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Malaysia.

Once again Team Malaysia had a strong and consistent race. Team Malaysia again showed a lot of maturity, with Alex defending well and not putting a foot wrong.

Our 5th place finished should in theory create a support boost for the Team when A1GP visits Malaysia in a couple of weeks’ time.

So far Team Malaysia has shown a lot of promise. In the last round at Estoril, Fairuz Fauzy demonstrated some race skill by passing others when other drivers were failing, although ultimately in Estoril we were thwarted by yet another pitstop gremlin.

The difference in performance between Malaysia and second place (GB) was not that significant although France seemed to be on another level. So there’s a lot of hope for Team Malaysia.

After 4 rounds, Malaysia is in tenth overall on 23 points, although as ever it could have been more if not for the troubles in round 2 and 3. So the underlying performance is there.

The key is for Team Malaysia to continue improving relative to the others. Support is vital now, if Malaysia wishes to create some impression in what is a new series.